The Foreigner's Coat: Installation by Livia Marinescu & Ilinca Vanau

On the 5 September we hosted the private view of 'The Foreigner's Coat: Installation by Livia Marinescu & Ilinca Vanau'. Thank you to all our guests who joined us for the event. We were more than happy to see how interested people were in the subject of the exhibition as well as the artworks.

The imminent lifting of the last restrictions on the British labour market applied to Romanians and Bulgarians brings again the issue of immigration into sharp focus. While the British media generally vilifies 'the other', a larger debate on multiculturalism is being avoided. The Foreigner's Coat aims at deconstructing the media mechanism of labeling Romanians as a homogenous and threatening mass of migrants by focusing on individual stories. Since the conversation about immigration in Britain seems to be stuck today at a macro level, the installation proposes a more personal way of looking at this subject. Livia Marinescu and Ilinca Vanau have created a series of custom-made coats imprinted with articles from the British press, which they then presented to various members of the Romanian Diaspora in the UK. This installation also includes a series of photographs of Romanian nationals living in Britain, who are affected, in a way or another by this distorted image promoted by the British press. Facing an inflammatory rhetoric regarding Eastern European migrants,

The Foreigner's Coat, as a community project, draws attention upon the fact that every immigrant living in the UK is part of a wider, inclusive assemblage.